The sad demise of the church pew

Imagine a child’s drawing of the interior of a traditional English church and the elements the picture is likely to contain. There will be colourful stained-glass windows, an altar and, almost certainly, rows of sturdy wooden pews. Yet the sad truth is that in parish after parish, the pews – which are often centuries old – are being removed and replaced by grimly functional chairs, of the sort to be found in any meeting hall or conference centre. I recently went to my own mid-Victorian parish church after a couple of months away and was dismayed to find the familiar old pews all gone and in their stead identikit rows of seats with pink cushions.

Why do the Church of England’s seating arrangements matter? Isn’t the getting of bums on to ecclesiastical seats the only thing that counts in our aggressively secular era of declining congregations? My answer would be a frustratingly ambivalent ‘yes but no’ – the two issues are linked.